


touchstone

by mercuryhatter



Category: Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)
Genre: Depression, Gen, Psychosis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-09
Updated: 2014-10-09
Packaged: 2018-02-20 12:56:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2429642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mercuryhatter/pseuds/mercuryhatter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>fun with psychotic depression</p>
            </blockquote>





	touchstone

**Author's Note:**

> used for reference: my own experiences, the wikipedia page on grounding techniques for dissociation

There were good times and bad times, with Adam’s malaise ebbing and flowing without paying much mind to the seasons of the Earth, but still cyclical, mostly predictable and never-ending. He stocked up on blood when he could feel the bad times coming because once they set in, he didn’t leave the house and he let no one enter it, which really wasn’t a huge change from the norm except that Ian was left floundering outside. He still came at least once a week, though, bless him, and he was allowed entry once again when the bad time had passed.

 

During the bad times, there was not much music. Humans seemed to think that the darker your mind went the more creative you could be, but the darkness was never stimulating, just deep and sucking like a singularity, more grey than black. Bad dreams would follow Adam into the nighttime until reality felt at once paper thin and like a thick coat of non-Newtonian fluid, that would ripple when you touched it but ultimately return to its previous shape. There were checkpoints and touchstones scattered throughout Adam’s house, and sometimes he would pace the halls and rooms restlessly, touching for reassurance the guitar placed here, the book placed there, the reminder that he was real scratched onto a wall in chalk. He had looked up human methods of staying connected to himself but they were all useless: what year is it? who cared. what’s your full name? he’d had so many. what are three things that you can smell/see/touch/taste? his senses were too wide-ranging on three of those and far too narrow on the fourth. So he constructed his whole home as a testament to reality, shifting things around when his delusions started to become too smart for his current system. He’d been playing this game with his brain for centuries, and he supposed if he was still alive that meant he hadn’t lost yet.

  
It could sometimes seem as if he’d lost, though. When day and night blurred into just an endless progression of hours, when reality shook and trembled around him so much that all he could do was hide behind a couch and hold his head between his hands until it passed, when he couldn’t get ahead of his brain soon enough to keep it on track and the loss of control spent him spiraling into panic. When the phone rang and he knew it was Eve but he couldn’t get off the floor long enough to answer it, when his blood supply ran out but the idea of stepping out the front door was so terrifying he cried about it in the bathtub for an hour, when he eventually just slept and slept and slept until he wasn’t sure there was anything else he knew how to do anymore. If this went on long enough, or if he could pull himself up long enough to choke out the words _it’s bad_ , then Eve would come, and she was the most solid touchstone of them all. She wasn’t a cure or a fix but his brain would clear slightly he saw her, would quiet a bit when he was enfolded in her arms. She didn’t understand, had never understood, she thought that everything could be fixed with a good book or a dance, but she stayed, and that was the important part. He could hold onto her presence long enough to get ahead of his brain again, long enough unload the bullet from the gun even if he could bring himself to get rid of neither. The cycle would begin again and he supposed that this part could be called spring, when his fingers woke long enough to remember how to play more than just runs on a violin, when he could sing again without crying or hold a drumstick without thinking what he could do to himself with it. Adam had no connection with the sun, but he felt he could sympathize with the importance humans placed on it when he emerged into a good time.


End file.
